One foot in sea, and one on shore,

To one thing constant never.

William Shakespeare

The other day I rode my bike to a nature reserve and stood looking over a wide meadow sloping towards a small lake. At the edge of the meadow, on a nesting pole, perched a pair of ospreys watching over their nest.

As I contemplated this scene, it began to dawn on me that apart from humans, nature as a whole changes only imperceptibly with the passing years. In stark contrast, however, the human experience exhibits a perplexingly rapid pace of change, especially in modernized societies, that can be wearying and even overwhelming. Why is this? What has taken root in human civilization that sets the course of our lives apart from every other living thing? 

While natural processes typically change with nearly indiscernible slowness — consider tectonic plate movements, for example — sudden and dramatic changes also occur. Anyone living in Washington or Oregon in the 1980s will remember the eruption of Mount St. Helens, when 1,300 feet of the mountaintop suddenly blew off and vaporized into ash. But even occasional catastrophic changes are actually part of an overall natural process that will gradually wind down.

The Human Pace of Life

In contrast, the human pace of life and the changes we experience over one lifetime seem to be accelerating. In some cases, the rate of change can be described as exponential, which essentially means that the amount of something continually doubles with the passage of a fixed amount of time. The curious thing about exponential growth rates is that they can initially be outpaced by a slower, linear growth rate, but the exponentially growing phenomenon eventually skyrockets. Mathematically, the growth is unlimited, but in the finite physical universe, practical limitations of resources always curtail the growth.

One of the most significant examples of an exponential growth pattern that has lasted for more than five decades is termed Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years with minimal rise in cost….This extrapolation based on an emerging trend has been a guiding principle for the semiconductor industry for close to 60 years.

Aside from its relevance to the microelectronics industry, the rise in computing power has engendered technology advances that have permeated human civilization and dramatically affected our way of life for most people.

Mobile apps, video games, spreadsheets, and accurate weather forecasts: that’s just a sampling of the life-changing things made possible by the reliable, exponential growth in the power of computer chips over the past five decades.

The growth in the capability of microelectronics has, coupled with human ingenuity and imagination, paved the way for rapid changes in the human experience.

These ongoing changes in digital electronics have been a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth.

Change and Technology 

One could argue that apart from the availability of new technology, human culture would maintain the kind of stasis or imperceptibly slow rate of change that characterizes other aspects of the natural world. In a recent article, Denyse O’Leary suggested this connection between change and available technology.

But then, it’s also fair to ask, if our ancestors had authentically human minds, why didn’t technology progress faster? Why did it take hundreds of thousands of years to go from the mastery of fire to blacksmithing, and then thousands of years to go from that to the internal combustion engine? Good question! Why did it take hundreds of years to go from Blaise Pascal’s computer to your laptop?

Those delays are not a fact about the human mind so much as a fact about technology. Technologies build on each other. A number of them must be in the right place at the right time before any great leaps can happen. Otherwise, creativity flourishes as an exercise of the imagination only.

While solid state electronics technology must exist before human engineers can create a cell phone, the availability of the technology is obviously insufficient as a cause of mobile electronics. Unique, exceptional qualities inherent in human beings are required for it to make a difference. Humans are not only creative enough to imagine practical products utilizing microelectronic circuitry, but they can develop the technology in the first place, essentially by experimenting with raw materials dug out of the ground. 

In contrast, primates have existed longer than humans — why haven’t they developed better technology? Obviously, something sets humans apart from the rest of nature, non-living and living. Greater intelligence, as might be applied in comparing animals — saying, for example, that dogs are smarter than rabbits — doesn’t adequately explain the difference between humans and animals. Human accomplishments are immeasurably greater than canine accomplishments, but few would claim that humans are immeasurably more intelligent than dogs.

Interstellar Space Travel

In a recent Evolution News article, I briefly considered some science fiction scenarios for achieving interstellar space travel. It’s an interesting point in the historical development of human technology that a scientifically literate author of science fiction from the mid 20th century completely missed the advent and explosive growth of computational technology. In a colossal clash of anachronistic and futuristic technologies, the sci-fi author wrote of spaceship pilots using slide rules to calculate their course corrections while on interstellar journeys!

As amusing as this seems to us today, it perhaps speaks of the unexpected nature of the digital electronics age that has so captivated almost the entire human race. Is there something to ponder here? On a related front, as someone who has enjoyed imagining the arc of future progress in technology, I feel somewhat disappointed that not much of what was envisioned in earlier sci-fi stories, beyond digital electronics, has seen actualization. Humans reached the moon more than 50 years ago, and yet we have still traveled no further. The practical, physical limitations on traveling light years through space may well be keeping us fairly close to home.

The growth in digital electronics has relied upon continuous miniaturization of circuit elements. The practical end-of-the-road for decreasing the size of circuit elements is approaching, however, since the atomic building blocks of matter have a finite size. If you only have bricks to build with, you can’t build anything smaller than a brick. What might happen when the exponential rate of growth of circuit density reaches a ceiling? The effect might first be felt at the heart of Big Tech and its extension into our lives through the familiar smartphone and recent developments in AI.

This pace of innovation in the semiconductor industry also drives innovation in industries powered by semiconductor chips. This includes the consumer electronics sector that produces the latest smartphones and laptops, and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, cloud computing, internet of things (IoT) infrastructure, and next-generation telecommunications.

Reaching a plateau in computational power would likely put the brakes on the rate of change that has characterized the last couple of generations of humanity. Would such a pause in the exponential changes we’ve been experiencing produce a corporate sigh of relief for people, or would this introduce a new stress into the human experience? Have we become addicted to change?